``The interesting question is not whether we should talk more about class but how we should do so. And here, it has to be said, Michaels' book is a failure. Rarely have I found myself more in disagreement about how to reach a conclusion than I did while reading The Trouble With Diversity. Walter Benn Michaels is a master of rhetoric, a dazzling wordsmith who loves to poke holes in what he takes to be conventional thinking. Yet to make his points, he makes a series of assertions that, when examined with care, simply crumble. There is nothing in this book that would help promote informed discussions of economic equality in this country. There is instead a profusion of cynicism incompatible with any serious political agenda, including the one in which Michaels professes to believe...
Michaels, as these examples illustrates, belongs to the "shock and awe" school of political argument. First, you say something wildly implausible in the hopes that its dramatic counterintuitiveness will make it seem brilliant. Yet in the United States in which I live, race is an obvious fact of life, conversations about it remain awkward and uncomfortable, and both supporters and opponents of affirmative action are sincere in their convictions. It is true that saying such things would make for a very unoriginal book. But at least it would be an accurate one.''
Alan Wolfe
http://www.slate.com/id/2150826/
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The above review is pretty devastating. Wolfe makes many of the points, made on the WMB threads.
For the anti-WMB crowd, I strongly suggest reading the above link. You can just quote from it and save yourselves the time of thinking through and writing up arguments. I've spent since Saturday working some of the same points, Wolfe points out. Here's Wolfe's ending:
``If anyone can be accused of doing what Walter Benn Michaels accuses everyone else of doing—ignoring class by talking about race—it is Walter Benn Michaels himself.''
CG